The Woman from Bratislava Read Free Page A

vestiges of good humour.
    There I was, lying in that modern hotel with toothache, hearing in my head again and again the leader of our delegation’s deliberately spiteful introduction of me. With a couple of well-chosen words he got his revenge for the Research Council grant I had snatched from under his nose twelve years earlier. In academia we never forget a slight.
    In his atrocious English he had said:
    ‘And now here is Mr Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen. One of our leading experts in and researchers into Soviet affairs. Particularly the Breshnev years.’
    The former prime minister, with his beautifully cut hair and immaculate suit, had looked at me with his ice-blue fish eyes:
    ‘What a lot of useless information you carry around in your head,’ he said. Then he turned his X-ray gaze on young Lena, she of the long legs and the useful degree in ‘Transitional problems in the phase between plan economy and the global market. A study in options.’
    ‘Extremely helpful findings – for us too,’ the arrogant bastard had said, holding both her hand and her eyes for just a little too long before releasing her fingers with a glance at the hidden and yet so obvious secrets of her Wonderbra which made the normally hard-nosed Lena blush. Power is a tremendous aphrodisiac and the Czech was outrageously well-preserved.
    Fuck them all! Fuck the modern world! It sucks! As one of my numerous offspring would say. But I too had blushed, because he had hit me where it hurt. I had stood there trying to take comfort in the knowledge that I had had a fine academic career and no one could take that away from me. I had my history doctorate. My thesis had been described as a brilliant study of stagnation phenomena in the Breshnev era. It had been widely cited in international history journals and had earned me a guest lecture at America’s Harvard University in 1981, the year before the old bugger died. Unfortunately, my thesis had arrived at the conclusion that the inherent strength of the Soviet system outweighedits structural weaknesses. Reform was possible. The Soviet Union would enter the next millenium fortified and reinforced. The bipolar world dominated by the two big players, the USA and the USSR, was here to stay.
    I got a couple of good years out of Gorbachev, but after that there were no more invitations from the major universities in the US and Europe. And I was no longer a regular guest in the blue television news studio, providing clear, concise answers to the presenter’s carefully rehearsed questions. Because the whole flaming set-up had collapsed! I had actually got it wrong. And my fellow academics knew it. No journalist was likely to read every line of a doctoral thesis which came to the wrong conclusion, but my colleagues had memories like elephants, a fact of which I was reminded by the sound of their barely suppressed, gleeful sniggers when the former prime minister made his spiteful remark. They knew that I knew that at the time when I completed my highly acclaimed thesis and was able to put the letters Ph.D. after my name I was still far too young. Added to which, there had been no vacant professorships at the time and now it was too late. My knowledge was sadly outdated. I would never be able to boast the coveted title of Professor. For the rest of my days, until I started drawing my nice, fat pension I would have to make do with calling myself Lecturer in History. Trailing out every day to the south side of the city and the University of Copenhagen’s concrete jungle, where the thinking was often as low-slung as the ceilings in the hideous classrooms. Here, Teddy, as I was known to everyone, high and low, went around feeling sorry for himself, without of course knowing that he was doing so. Here, Teddy made a half-hearted attempt to teach and do research, in order, at least once in a while, to publish a scholarly paper. Here, Teddy gave guidance to future generations, fitting them to take over the bastions of